


Good Enough (Alice Would Agree)

by MissTaken4Mad



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jealous Susie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24877501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissTaken4Mad/pseuds/MissTaken4Mad
Summary: It wasn't as if Susie Campbell were particularly unused to being second best.orThe one where Susie has to get lost (and stabbed) to realize she's always been found.
Relationships: Joey Drew/Henry Stein (Mentioned), Susie Campbell/Allison Pendle
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	Good Enough (Alice Would Agree)

**Author's Note:**

> I played the game and IMMEDIATELY shipped these two. So naturally I immediately turned around and jumped on AO3 to search for fanfiction. There were more fanfics than I thought there would be, but still way too few D: So I thought I'd try my hand at writing my own, and this was the result.
> 
> EDITED- this was written in the wee hours of the morning and had a bunch of tense issues and just general sentence structure issues. I finally got around to fixing those.

It wasn’t as if Susie Campbell were particularly unused to being second best. Outshone.

Replaced.

Rather, she was so incredibly used to it that, by the time she was approached by one Mr. Joey Drew, her nails were bloody stubs from having to claw her way up to the top.

But she does reach it.

The top.

Eventually.

When tall, handsome Mr. Joey Drew, world famous cartoonist, picked _her_ out of a crowd in some low-end club and told her she— _she—_ was special… Well, for the first time in her life, Susie Campbell was happy to be Susie Campbell.

(For a moment.)

And it was wonderful. Working at the studio, learning her lines—

 _Becoming_ Alice Angel, who was just _everything_ Susie Campbell had ever dreamed of being.

All those years spent fighting for the scraps—leftover parts and cheap gigs singing at seedy clubs—and she couldn’t have landed a better job if she’d tried.

And then came Allison.

Pretty, plucky Miss Allison Pendle. Susie would have scoffed at her coworkers for falling all over themselves and tying themselves into knots just to earn her favor, had she not been right there, falling alongside them. Of course, Susie had more class than all that, and was a good enough actress to hide it, but inside, she was just the same as them. The first time Allison had looked up at her (somehow, despite being several inches taller, she had looked _up_ at Susie) with those big, doe eyes…

Well, just like becoming Alice Angel, that had been it.

Not even the great, indomitable Susie Campbell, with her all her cunning and mile-wide jealous streak, could resist that innocent, adoring smile Allison saw fit to grace her—and her alone—with.

For the first time in her life, Susie had seen something precious and beautiful, and been struck not with the urge to pluck it at the stem, but to protect and nurture it.

(The same, of course, couldn’t be said for Mr. Joey Drew. But that would come later. For now, they were only girls—star struck, innocent girls whose wildest dreams were coming true before their very eyes.

Before everything fell apart.

Before they learned just what went into the making of a dream.)

* * *

Susie had never had many female friends, and those she did make generally left as quickly as they’d come. It came with the territory, she supposed. She’d never questioned it.

Just like she never questioned why, when she let her mind wander, she always seemed to find her eyes drawn toward soft, full curves rather than sharp, muscular lines.

But that, too, changed with Allison.

The two girls—women, technically, but only children, really, back then—soon became inseparable, both around the studio and outside it. The sight became as commonplace as Henry and Joey’s playful bickering—Allison, following behind Susie like a puppy wagging its tail, and Susie, coyly looking over her shoulder, cat-eyes hiding a fondness that threatened to melt her very core.

And then.

* * *

In the end, Susie wasn’t even sure what it had been that started it all.

Had it been Sammy, once so sweet on Susie herself, now walking Allison through the lines that had been Susie’s with that oh-so-familiar look in his eye?

Had it been Allison, reading those lines, stealing Alice away from Susie before she’d even had a chance to shine?

Or…

Or had it been Sammy’s hand—large, calloused, hard—on the small of Allison’s back, where Susie’s own often so (painstakingly) casually drifted?

Perhaps it had been an amalgam of the three, combined with that sense of _normalcy_ —that sense that everything was just as it should be.

Without Susie.

Whatever it had been, that afternoon saw Susie going to see Mr. Joey Drew himself. She had stormed into his office, all perfume and curls and tinkling jewelry, planning to confront him, to demand…

To demand what?

What had it been?

It's been so long, now… She isn’t entirely sure what she had been planning to say, but something in her chest—a shred of something still beating—twists tellingly when she wonders on the possibility of demanding Allison’s removal from the studio.

(It twists still deeper when she tries to remember what she had wanted the outcome to be—she thinks perhaps she never really thought it through, just had some foggy, romanticized notion of Allison showing up on Susie’s doorstep, soaked with rain. Allison, crumbling into Susie’s waiting arms, swearing Sammy never meant a thing. Allison, tilting her head up, staring into Susie’s eyes, features growing larger, closer until Susie could count every last eyelash…

Fuck, she's sick.)

But whatever Susie had meant to saw that day—and however she had meant it—it ended up not mattering at all, in the end.

Because Mr. Joey Drew had had a proposition—one that took the impassioned words Susie had planned and strangled them right in her throat.

Mr. Joey Drew offered Susie—no, _Alice_ the one thing she wanted more than anything else.

More than the part. More than fame.

More than Allison.

(She thought, more than Allison.

She thought...well. She'd thought a lot of things, back then.)

* * *

And what had it come to? All those dreams? All those thoughts?

Alice’s features, already disfigured, twist in disgust at the memory.

How stupid she had been. How starry-eyed. How disgustingly _naive._

Joey Drew had played them all for fools—and, in the end, that rat bastard had been the only one to make it out.

And now, there is nothing.

Nothing but the studio, and the ink.

* * *

Sometimes, when things fall quiet, Alice catches herself thinking of _her_.

 _Allison_.

That innocent, adoring smile. Those bright, guileless eyes that had looked at Alice—or Susie, as she’d been before, in her previous life—like she’d hung the stars.

In these spare moments, Alice will feel something inside her twist sharply, kick-starting the sick pounding of some internal mechanism that had long-since become vestigial.

She hates it.

It feels alien, like a foreign object rattling around in her ribcage.

She hates it.

And so, she hates Allison.

But Allison, of course, had never understood. Back when things first went sour—back when Alice was first spewed from the ink machine, an abomination of a broken promise—Alice used to hear pounding at her door for hours. Allison, begging her to let her in. Apologizing. Swearing she never meant for it to happen—that she hadn’t _known_.

Every day, she came.

Or, what Susie thought was every day. It...became hard to tell, with nothing to see by but old factory lights reflecting off endless, flowing ink.

And then, almost abruptly, it had stopped.

(That makes something twist, too.)

Alice jams the comically large butcher knife into the shoulder of the latest Boris to venture down to Level 9. She closes her eyes and revels in the resistance, in the cool, clean slicing of metal through metal. Then she pulls it out, and repeats the action, over and over, stabbing the long-dead machine until the uncomfortable, unwelcome _feelings_ stop swirling in her chest. It doesn’t quite work—it never does, not fully, and she doesn’t _understand_ it, and it infuriates her. Her heart has long-since ceased to beat, so why ( _why_ ) do the damn _feelings_ remain?

It’s like an itch too deep to be scratched, and sometimes Alice feels the keening urge to cut _herself_ open to scoop out whatever the hell it is that’s making her _feel_ and throw it out with the rest of the worthless garbage.

Just like all those disgusting, noisy freaks.

Just like Susie.

* * *

She vaguely remembers Henry.

At the very least, it doesn’t particularly surprise her when he scurries to do her bidding like a dutiful little mouse. It’s entertaining—a momentary break in the monotony.

But the Boris he brings with him…

That Boris is _different_.

Special.

 _Truly_ special, not like Joey once said Susie was.

Maybe…maybe she can finally be special again.

* * *

This time when Allison stabs her in the back, she _literally_ stabs her in the back.

It’s a welcome deviation from the previous script, to be honest.

That’s the first thing that crosses Alice’s mind when she wakes up there, hours later, in the dark, with Henry and Allison long gone. Only the cold, hulking mechanical body of her Franken-Boris remains to keep her company.

Typical.

Something stings, but it’s not her back.

* * *

Pounding.

Stubborn firsts beating an incessant rhythm against thick metal doors.

How long has it been?

For some, inexplicable reason, Alice reaches for the intercom this time, instead of ignoring it as she had all those times before.

She tells herself its because the pounding is making her head hurt.

She tells herself she believes that.

“Go away.”

There. Petty, perhaps, but it makes her feel better.

The satisfaction, of course, is fleeting. Alice isn’t quite sure how she manages to hear the long-suffering sigh _through_ two feet of metal. “Susie, I’m—”

“Susie is _dead_! It’s _Alice_!”

Another sigh. (And at precisely what point had dewy-eyed little Allison Pendle grown such an attitude?)

“ _Alice_ , then. I’m _sorry_ —please, can we just talk?” _Like we used to_ , Alice hears, though the words remain unspoken, heavy in the air between them.

"Sorry for what?” Alice doesn’t know why she’s even still talking to her. Perhaps that reunion with sweet, gullible Henry has her craving even the most loathsome of sentient company.

There’s a pause, and then: “For…stabbing you, I guess?”

_I guess._ Alice scoffs to herself, and then, because like a child, she can’t resist: “Which time?”

Sigh. “ _Susie_ —”

“ _Alice_!”

“ _Susie,_ ” Allison insists, kicking the door in frustration, only to hunch over in pain a second later.

Alice smirks to herself. Serves her right. At least she isn’t the only one acting like a child. She watches as Allison pushes herself to her feet again, albeit with a wince.

“Susie, I…” Another sigh, but this time there’s something in the sound of it—something like defeat—that has Alice sitting up straight. “Will you please just open the door? I…I…I _miss_ you.”

A sniffle.

The smirk falls off Susie— _Alice’s_ face like melting butter. Something in her—something long buried, perhaps a subset of that loathsome itch in her chest—compels her to look toward the door, to the two feet of metal that separates her from Allison. Suddenly, those two feet feel impossibly far, and something pulls at her chest so desperately, so acutely that she finds herself standing before she can think better of it. As if in a trance, her hand brushes over the door operation lever. For a moment then, she comes back to herself and glares at her hand, as though daring it to defy her.

And then she yanks the rusty, ink-splattered handle down.

She hears the door open, but doesn’t move. She stands there at the lever, staring unseeingly at the random spatters of ink staining its surface, her shoulders hunched protectively around herself.

And then a firm, impossibly gentle hand comes to rest between those rigid shoulder blades, and Su— _Alice_ just _falls apart._

* * *

They sit there in awkward silence. Allison, apparently abruptly robbed of all fervor, stares at Alice with that familiar doe-eyed stare (somehow it looks out of place on the strong woman she’s become) and bites her lip like a schoolgirl, while Alice artfully ignores her, focusing on a worn poster instead. Only someone who knew Alice very well would notice that her chin was tilted just so, head turned at just the right angle so as to cast the deformities that marred her face into shadow.

Unfortunately, this otherwise rather masterful tactic was wasted on current company, as Allison just happened to _be_ one of those vanishingly few ‘someones’ in question before everything when to hell.

“Susie?”

Her voice comes out small, timid—a mere shadow of the persistent, demanding tone she’d taken when pounding on the door, Susie— _Alice, godamnit,_ notices. She knows all of this, and yet is infuriated to discover that she is just as helpless to the tone as she was…well, god knows how long ago, now.

“What?”

“I…” Allison’s voice breaks, and Alice doesn’t dare look at her. When she does speak again, it comes out in a rush, as if she’s had the words built up inside of her for years, boiling just below the surface. “I didn’t mean to take the part from you, I swear, if I’d known that’s why Sammy called me in that day, I would’ve quit before doing anything that would hurt you, Susie, I swear—”

Alice presses her fingers to her temples as Allison continued to blabber apologies and promises. She is, in this precise moment, beginning to realize just what that tingling, that annoying, that impossible _itch_ has been all this time. Because here, listening to Allison ramble on and on about whatever the hell it is she's so worked up about, the annoying little tingle is becoming all-consuming, threatening everything she has become—all the hard, bloody work she’s done—since being tricked into that damnable Ink Machine.

That tingling, she realizes abruptly, is _Susie_ , trying to claw her way out, just like she clawed her way to the top all those years ago.

Susie, whom Alice had been so sure she’d thrown away like the second-rate garbage she was.

Susie, who’d never been good enough.

Susie, who’d never been special.

There were a hundred and one reasons Alice had left Susie behind so long ago.

But, in this particular moment, the _biggest_ problem with Susie Campbell is that, unlike Alice Angel, Susie Campbell is completely, foolishly, head-over-heels in love with one Miss Allison Pendle.

“Why?”

Her voice, to her humiliation, comes out cracked, breaking. But Allison looks up at her, drawn by her voice like a puppet on a string, and Alice—no, _Susie_ is struck by a wave of fondness that threatens to drag her under.

“Why what?”

Susie takes a deep breath, eyes fluttering closed. The words are reluctant to come out—an admission of weakness when she’d done so much to eliminate everything weak from her body—but she forces them anyway. “Why did you come down here?” Allison opens her mouth to respond, but Susie shakes her head, holding up her hand. “For all that time, when everything first…went to hell. You came down here, every day—I think it was everyday—god, I don’t know, but you were here all the time, pounding on that door. Why?”

Allison blinks at her then, frowning as if Susie’s just asked her what color the sky is (blue—maybe, she thinks…maybe Susie needs to come up with some new similes). “Why…Well, because I love you, of course,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Susie’s heart suddenly feels too big for her chest. She stands, seemingly drawing confidence from the air itself as she takes a step closer to Susie and reaches up to cup her cheek. Her deformed cheek. Susie jerks away as if the cool touch is a red-hot branding iron, turning her head away from Allison—pretending not to see the hurt look she leaves in her wake. “I told you, if I had known what was going on, I never would have gone with Sammy that day. Don’t you…don’t you know that?”

And now Allison’s looking at her like she’s about to cry, and Susie just doesn’t have enough room left in her makeshift body to deal with all the conflicting emotions anymore. “I…I didn’t think…,” she stammers, still curling in on herself.

Something in Allison’s expression changes—hurt transforms into realization—and she reaches out again. This time, when Susie makes to jerk away, Allison is ready, and her hand remains steady, gently but firmly forcing Susie to look at her. She strokes her thumb over the scarred tissue and stares into Susie’s hesitant eyes with her own blazing, determined ones.

“You’re beautiful, Susie,” she says, voice quiet but underlined with a something unwavering that leaves no room for argument. “You’ve _always_ been beautiful.”

And that’s all (and more than) Susie can handle.

With a painful, broken sob that racks her entire body, she collapses onto her knees, fat, ugly blobs of ink spilling from her eyes. Allison falls with her and pulls her into her tight embrace, and, for the first time in her life, as everything falls apart around her, Susie Campbell feels _whole_.

* * *

It’s a few hours—minutes, days—later when Susie finally feels able to function again.

She sits up slowly, feeling like she used to after a long nights’ clubbing, pouting slightly when she feels Allison’s hand slide off her back as a result. The last she could remember, she’d been sobbing like a baby into Allison’s lap, and at some point, must have slipped into sleep—the first time since coming out of the Ink Machine.

It’s also the first time she’s felt like herself since…well, since even before.

Her mind is slightly clearer now, for better or for worse. Thinking back, she realizes that, emotionally fraught as the moment had been, there had been a few topics left less than clear.

“Allison, sweetie,” she says, unthinkingly falling back on an old term of endearment that has Allison beaming like she just got a pony for Christmas, “what you said before…about me and…specifically, how you felt about me…” She flushes, dark grey ink rushing to her cheeks instead of the red of blood.

Allison blinks, looking once again like the sweet-faced girl who’d mistakenly wandered into Susie’s dressing room on her first day at the studio. “What I…oh!” And then, as if realizing exactly what she’d said for the first time, her cheeks darken to match Susie’s. “I mean…I didn’t…well, I did, but…I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything, if you don’t feel the same, it’s okay, I won’t say anything about it again. It’s just…”

Susie feels a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Allison always did used to ramble on when she got flustered. “Just…?” she prods gently, with a patience she doesn't feel. She is acutely aware of each pump of ink that forces its way through her veins as Allison pauses, biting her lip. Susie swallows hard, feeling a rock there that she can’t for the life of her remember swallowing.

“Just…I always looked up to you, even before I came to work at the studio, and then when I did…,” Allison pauses again, searching for words, “and then when I did, I _met_ you and…and you were even more than I had imagined. More talented, more charming…more beautiful.” Her flush darkens, and she gulps audibly, looking more like the innocent, burgeoning starlet she used to be by the second. “I wouldn’t say anything, but…but now it kind of seems like why not, right? Now that we’re all stuck in here forever, things don’t seem as big as they used to be. What I mean to say is…I always had the biggest crush on you, Susie, and then, when I got to know you, to work with you…how could a girl not fall head-over-heels in love with you?”

Susie blinks. Allison stares down at her hands, fingers twisting into knots in her lap.

Several thousand neurons spark simultaneously, furiously in Susie’s mind, desperately trying to connect.

And then, all at once, they do.

"You were…in love with me?”

Allison’s flush darkens to a point that makes Susie slightly concerned for her health, but still, she finds the courage to speak. (God, and she'd always been so brave. Not like Susie.) “ _Am_ ,” Allison says, finally raising her eyes to meet Susie’s again. “I _am_ in love with you. I’m…I’m sorry,” she adds, staring back down at her lap.

"No,” Susie replies quickly, reaching out and grabbing one of Allison’s twitching hands, causing Allison to look up at her again. In that moment, the doubts assault her, threaten to overcome her: _why_? _How can anyone love such a hideous monster?_ But what comes out, in a moment of panic as Allison turns away from her, is, “No, please… _please_ don’t be sorry.”

Her voice breaks, and to her embarrassment, she feels the tears returning. She opens her mouth to speak, but realizes she doesn’t know how to put into words all the things she needs to say. Her jaw works uselessly, and she feels the hot ink welling up in the corners of her eyes.

 _No,_ goddamnit _Susie, don’t you mess this up too…_

But, once again, it’s pretty, plucky Allison Pendle who steps up to save her.

Even as the tears threaten to spill over, Susie feels that soft, gentle hand take her chin again, feels that thumb lovingly caress the countless scars there. And then, quite suddenly, she can’t feel anything, because Allison is close, _so close_ , and Susie can finally count each individual eyelash framing those beautiful eyes.

And then she can’t see anything at all, but as warm, impossibly soft lips meet her own, she _feels_ everything.

* * *

“So what have you and _Tom_ been up to, skulking around down there?” Susie grouses, even as her fingers card mindlessly through Allison's loose hair. She feels, rather than hears, Allison’s giggle, and pouts. “All that time, with only each other…a girl’s bound to wonder.”

They lie curled against each other on the relatively un-inkstained bed in Alice Angel's dressing room, which Susie had long ago transformed into a relatively impressive personal bedroom. Even the bed, stuffed mostly with the cotton filling of salvaged Bendy plushes (only the Bendy ones, and only after they'd been decapitated--Susie _hates_ that damned devil) is only mildly ink-stained. Really, the place is probably nicer than Susie's old, cheap studio apartment ever had been. Not that she remembers much of it, now.

Suddenly realizing that Allison hasn't answered her yet, she turns her full attention back to the woman in her arms, gaze piercing and expectant. Allison hums thoughtfully, drawing Susie's sharp eyes downward, to her full lips, as she awaits her response.

“Well, first of all, considering Tom’s been locked in a _Boris_ costume the entire time, there are certain ethical issues preventing any hanky-panky." Allison embellishes this statement with an almosy painfully cheesy wink-and-nudge. Susie finds the effect stupidly adorable, but refuses to let the subject die so easily. Instead she huffs and makes to pull her hand away. Allison rolls her eyes fondly and catches it, squeezing it before guiding it back down to curl around her hip. “But _no_ \- even if he _wasn’t_ perpetually trapped in the body of a cartoon wolf, nothing would have happened between us.”

She rolls over onto her elbows, smiling down at Susie’s petulant expression, her hair falling loosely over Susie’s shoulders. “Nothing to be jealous over.”

Susie scoffs, pulling Allison down by the back of her neck and capturing her lips in a hard, possessive kiss. “I’m _not_ jealous,” she drawls, once they break apart. It's a lie, of course, they both know that--Susie's always been such a horrible, jealous girl, after all, even before being chewed up and spat out by that abominable machine--but the sight of Allison's blown pupils and kiss-swollen lips soothes the familiar, bitter bite. "Only wondering if I need add one last Boris to my collection.”

Allison glares reproachfully, though Susie’s low, growling tone sets her nerves dancing. “No more Borises,” she says sternly. Then, laying back down and cuddling into Susie’s side, she kisses her scarred cheek and continues, more seriously this time, “You don't _need_ them. You’re beautiful exactly as you are, Susie. You always have been—you never needed to change yourself, and you don’t now. You’re beautiful just by being you.” She pauses, running her fingers over Susie’s stomach, over smooth flesh and scars alike. “And I’m just happy to finally have you back, Susie. Because, you know...Alice Angel's got nothing on you.”

And, for the first time, Susie feels like despite it all, in this moment, there’s nobody in the world she’d rather be than Susie Campbell.


End file.
